Summary: This series is adopted from Max Lucado’s book 3:16. He loves! We need to understand this. John 3:16 is the key to understanding God.

• There is a lot of hurt in the world each and every day. Life does not seem very fair at times does it?

• Good people are losing their jobs, homes, and retirement accounts. Even the planet Pluto is not considered a planet anymore. Where is the justice in that!

• When you look at the world around you it can be easy to get so wrapped up in the bad stuff that we forget about our God.

• It is easy to think He is not there for you, that He does not care about you.

• There are times when hope seems to be far away. I believe the world is spinning out of control because people do not understand God.

• Today we are going to begin a series based on Max Lucado’s Book “3:16 The Numbers of Hope”.

• SLIDE #2

• The world needs hope, they need to hope that is found in Jesus! They need to have the hope that springs from the Easter holiday that we will celebrate in just five short weeks.

• This series is built upon on the verse that is the key verse in the Bible.

• John 3:16 is the Rosetta Stone that helps us to understand what we read in the bible, it helps us to understand what God is all about. It helps us to understand why God has done what He has done as well as why He is doing what He is doing.

• It tells us that the mainspring of God’s being is love. It is easy to think of God as looking at men in their self-centeredness and their disobedience and their rebellion and saying: "I’ll break them: I’ll discipline them and punish them and scourge them until they come back."

• The text reveals that we have a God who loves us more than we can ever imagine.

• Today our focus will be on the fact that He Loves!

• This word is a word we have worn out, we love our spouses, food, sports, the list of what we love is unending. Over use of the word love has left the word with the punch of a butterfly’s wing.

• As we examine this love He has for us, let us begin our look at God’s love for us by seeing that we cannot win God’s love.

• SLIDE #3

SERMON

I. YOU CAN’T WIN IT.

• This is such an important concept, and it can be a hard one to grasp because of our need to try to win the love and approval of those around us.

• If you are driven by the need to win the love of others, you will have a lot of problems in live.

• I had a young lady I used to coach when I was in another town who was a sweet young lady; however, this young lady was driven to try to win the love of her father.

• This girl told me once that she had struck out some like 12 hitters, and she got the win. She walked a couple of batters and her father berated her all the way home.

• Nothing this young lady could do was good enough. This life of this otherwise sweet young lady has been ruined because she never felt she could measure up to what her father wanted for her.

• That is a sad dose of reality isn’t it.

• The issue of God who created us loving us is something that can be hard to grasp.

• As a result we try to win God’s love by trying to be good enough, work hard enough, give enough, and look good enough.

• For whatever reason we have this desire to try to win or earn what we cannot win or earn.